Last week we saw HP announce the end of the WebOS hardware development during their end-of-quarter investor conference call. Last week also saw the most ridiculous bump, so old that names on the forum even fail to be recognized. There is only one way to cancel a division by zero: let us push it to the limit with the world’s shortest bumpday!

Palm, point on the dolphin where HP Touchpad you.

Less than a week ago, discussion about HP’s future was pushed to our forums from a source that was not us. We will overlook the short-sightedness, of course, as they were no doubt too busy short-selling HP stock. For those shareholders unlucky enough to ride the wave they ended up more washed-up than HP has been in the last 6 years. We shall ignore the cross-Atlantic cruise missiles and end with the hope of a new Destruction Derby or Wipeout game on the PC. Mmm -- nostalgia.

We just recently saw Tim write up a piece on a Trojan designed to force your computer to mine for Bitcoins and deliver the results to an attacker or someone the attacker wishes to receive the currency. The virus currently affects versions of Windows from 98 straight up through Windows 7 and shows just another way that viruses are being used to make money. That was not always the case -- at one point viruses were almost always about making you aggravated in some way shape or form, at least until people figured out how to make money from someone else’s computer.

Mined the intrusion? Just a bits.

So back in 2000, back before the forums could remember your username, what antivirus software should you use? Personally I didn’t use any as I figured the occasional reinstall of Windows was enough if I got nailed by a virus. For the others who used Antivirus software, which did they choose? PC-Cillin 98 was the choice of a K7M motherboard owner because the K7M motherboard chose it. Norton and McAfee were still around back then though Grisoft, later AVG, made its niche as the free antivirus back then as well. F-Secure got a nod for picking up something that both McAfee and Norton couldn’t. Eventually the thread slipped on some Black Ice and started talking about Firewalls which are now mostly irrelevant due to routers.

Just recently we looked at a Tom’s Hardware review of CPU architecture since about 2005. While the performance of the CPU itself was not covered in the review, that was entirely not the purpose of the article; the problem investigated was whether there was a lot of innovation with the architectures themselves or whether companies were just ramping up the clock rate and adding more cores to get their performance. Implied in the article’s findings was the extent to which Intel was relying on a higher clock rate to even be comparable to AMD at the time, and even if they were being comparable is debatable. At some point AMD decided to change their tactics and stop ranking their processors by clock rate due to the huge disparity between Intel’s performance and their own at any given clock. This drew some flak in the forums but ended up sticking as even Intel dropped the Gigahertz moniker.

I owned a Core 2 Duo E6600 MHz! It’s so fast they needed to count in hex!

Scott, not me but another Scott, accused AMD back in 2001 of confusing users about the actual clock rate of their products. That post was crushed by video gaming’s most popular astrophysicist: yes, exactly. That didn’t stop the debate about whether that is an ethical thing to do, whether Intel’s ethics are any better, or whether they’re hypocrites. Regardless, the soapbox was eventually put away and everyone went back to their lives.

This week (actually today) Jeremy went back in time and drug out the old DOSSHELL out of the 80’s and early 90’s and recounted Microsoft’s rise as a software platform company. The personal computer caught on quickly with DOSSHELL getting replaced for Windows, then Windows 95 and so forth to the present. And while Jeremy has fond memories of Wing Commander I just cannot help but see his Kilrathi raise him a Privateer.

… so I installed a bump in your bump so you can bump while you bump.

Just ten days before Halloween 2003 the fifth stepson of Newton had an important report to write for his history class, so we think. Xzibit then proclaimed that Microsoft pimped DOS Auto. Wait, what is this? Did Jim put the bump in my bumping bumpday bump? (Who put the RAM in the eighty-eighty-six slot?) But yes it is true, it is amazing to see how far we, especially the old farts, have come.

This week LG unveiled their glasses-free 3D LCD display with only a minimal amount of LG employees trying to pet a poorly Photoshopped Formula One race car. 3D is quite heavily promoted lately with the hype machine apparently being fueled by anthropomorphic blue cats and Box Office records. 3D on the PC has been around for much longer, however. NVIDIA and ELSA had support for 3D glasses over a decade ago for 3D effects in games of the time. There really has not really been much said about 3D between then and the rush of publicity now so I guess it is time to bump it up in our memory.

This week’s intermission… in the third dimension

In August 2002 the epitome of threads on ATI’s lack of 3D stereoscopic support was born with a simple message: give your greens to the green. Of course whenever you mention one brand over another there immediately becomes a three-way comparison between the market leaders: ATI, nVidia, and Matrox (wha-what!?! Actually another article will be posted soon; an old Matrox technology has a spiritual successor… because the body’s long since dead.) Even back then, however, we had people who bashed 3D technology long before it was cool to dislike 3D technology. Some people like it a lot though, enough to drop down 1600$ on a pair of 3D VR glasses, but no money on an ATI card.

This week Mozilla released Firefox 7 into the Aurora channels and probably about twenty other versions elsewhere as well. Firefox has come under fire (heh heh) lately for its ridiculously rapid release schedule particularly for those interested in deploying Internet Explorer alternatives in the enterprise market. With the recent release of Firefox 5 it is only reasonable that Firefox 7 be nearing its prime too. The major advancement for this version is the concentration on performance, in particular: memory leakage. Mozilla grew a slight reputation lately for not being the quickest and most responsive browser. That title was once held by Internet Explorer compared to the much faster Firebird. I guess it is time to bump it up in our memory.

Despite Mozilla being strict with their logo… rule 34. Let’s leave it at that.

This week the second season of Starcraft 2 came to a close immortalizing whatever rank you happened to be just prior to the lock. This is the second league freeze that Starcraft 2 underwent since it was launched last July. Starcraft 2 was a very anticipated launch for Blizzard due to the twelve year gap between it and its predecessor, Starcraft. Our forums were just one of many places where rabid fans frothed over Starcraft and I believe we deserve to nostalgia over it.

The calendar says 7/7/2011… … Bumpedaday??

Back in early 2001, just over ten years ago, ccrazy1263 created a very energetic forum thread questioning the coming of a new Starcraft. Blizzard would not even announce the existence of a new Starcraft until over 6 years later. One thing that comes with Starcraft is that players will constantly tell you their strategies, good or bad, and there were a few instances of that in this thread. In closing, the best advice to be had from this thread is short and sweet: Don’t play Hunter or Lost Temple against Hacker. They’ll kill your expansion.

This week Crytek released their DirectX 11 update to Crysis 2 and immediately hushed the crowing of all GPUs everywhere. We have gone through the various advancements in fairly great detail but that was not the first time our GPUs came Crying to us about the monster that goes Polybump in the night. No, our forums were aflame even before Crysis back when Far Cry was about to reach its Beta phase. I guess it is time to bump it up in our memory.

CryingTek

Back in early 2004 our forum-goers rallied around now defunct pre-beta screenshots of the best graphics they have ever seen… in 2004. People were surprised of the novelty of having mutant zombies in your game… in 2004. People were gathered to play with their fellow amdmb members… in 2004. People were gloating about how they cannot show what the beta looked like due to non-disclosure agreements… back in 2004. Of course we now know everything about Far Cry, its official sequel from another developer, and both of its spinoff sequels from its original developer. But obviously, what we know now we did not know then; let us nostalgia at the forum thread long since forgotten.

This past week Sony decided to release their first video in their new tablet PC ad campaign months before the release of their product. By the end of the campaign Sony promises five total videos parts (excluding a prologue and maybe more spin-offs just to make me a liar) which they hope will captivate you until the autumn. The first thing I thought of when viewing this video is the Honda Cog video so I guess it is time to bump it up in our memory.

You forgot the uphill rolling tires Sony!

Back in April 2003 our web forum went abuzz with Honda’s stunning Rube Goldberg machine made mostly out of Honda Accord parts. It did not take long for discussion to devolve into picking on then-mocked FORD because most four-letter words are easy to make acrostic poems for. None of the links still work as they are 8 years old; however, it is still available to be viewed on Youtube and I would be irresponsible to embed it here as well. So nostalgia at the commercial, and nostalgia at the forum thread long since forgotten.

Yesterday saw the launch of Duke Nukem Forever. If you were a member of our forums for a long period of time you might actually have an odd case of deja vu. This is actually the second time that we have experienced the launch of Duke Nukem Forever. The first time was a sick joke one April fool’s day over nine years ago which is quite fitting for the lewd and crude franchise. Some argue that our current release is a sick joke, but that is a whole other story.

Duke Nukem: Forever and 3363 days.

Back in April 1st, 2002: Think Geek announced the availability of Duke Nukem Forever for Linux, Windows 3.1, WheatoniX, and Plan 9. The general buzz on the forum was about the marvel of being a PC gamer and how much of an impact Duke Nukem 3D had on our lives. So go on, nostalgia at the old fashioned giant PC gaming boxes and nostalgia at the forum thread long since forgotten.